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A beachfront mansion in Milford's Fort Trumbull section is one of the few places during Sunday's walk that announced a private beach area.
MILFORD -- Escaping slaves, bootleggers, pirates, tragic drownings and heroic rescues, the western half of the city's waterfront has seen it all -- or at least people insist that it has.

City Historian Richard Platt said earlier that he couldn't confirm the tunnels found under a house facing Fort Trumbull Beach were a stop on the Underground Railroad, conducting slaves north to freedom before the Civil War. Whether or not "rum runners" unloaded contraband whiskey from Canada in those tunnels during the 1920s Prohibition era also can't be substantiated, he said.

But the tunnels are real, Platt said, and were built as part of the old Fort Trumbull that once defended that section of the city from the British. Another local legend has it that the fearsome-- or foppish-- Milford Grenadiers lined up along Fort Trumbull Beach, rattling their sabers loud enough to scare away a British frigate. Or so the story goes. Platt, a retired history teacher descended from a Grenedier officer, declined to confirm that one either.

Charles Island, tantalizingly reachable from Silver Sands State Park by a tombolo at low tide, may hold Captain Kidd's treasure. Kidd's biographer, Richard Zaks, said he doubts it very much, but that hasn't stopped a fun annual festival, at which the fearsome pirate "invades" downtown.

The back side of the island probably holds a fortune in guano, and it once was the site of a religious retreat. Five men and boys returning from the retreat on the

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day before Easter, 1929, drowned when their boat capsized, historian Michael C. Dooling said. A statue of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, stood on the island as a memorial for years after, he said.

"The Chicken Lady," Doris Gagnon, won national fame in the 1970s and '80s when she refused to move out of her mobile home to make way for the creation of the state park. Officials waited until Gagnon died. Her trailer stood about where the boardwalk meets the beach.

Myrtle Beach, the next neighborhood west, was home to "beach kids" for generations before urban renewal changed the face of the community in the late 1960s. The reminiscences collected by Jeanette Acton, Eleanor Benefico and Florence Zielinski formed the basis of "Sand in Our Shoes," a poignant history of their childhoods.

The salty tang of the air at Walnut Beach had to compete with smells of fried dough, cotton candy and hot dogs for most of the first half of the 20th Century, with the amusement park, The Beachhead, Pat and Lou's and Penuchie's. When local boy Alfred "Red" Moffitt knocked out Julius Kogan of New Haven in the Walnut Beach Stadium in the late 1930s, it was the high-water mark for professional boxing here.

Wildermere Beach and its tonier neighbor to the west, Laurel Beach, tended to clear out after Labor Day, but nearly all the homes in both are now used year-round. Famed architect Stanford White laid out the Laurel Beach section, with its Green and Casino.

-- FRANK JULIANO